by lize Spit
July 15, 2002
FOR THE FIRST time I hope that something relatively terrible will happen to a mutual but distant acquaintance, something only I know about, so I’ll have a story to tell Pim and Laurens that’s worthy of their full attention.
A story like the one about the drunk tourist who, after a party at the Pulse Pallieterzaal, walked out into the cemetery next door to take a piss, steadied herself on a loose headstone and ended up crushed by “Josepha Louis, 1856–1924”, surely something Josepha wouldn’t have wanted either. Or like the one about the local policeman who was accused of killing his own wife, or the man who climbed into a tree with a chainsaw to trim the branches, accidentally cut off his own head and went unnoticed by the postman for several days.
My urge to tell these kinds of stories is stronger than I am. It’s kind of like needing to pee. I can postpone it for a little while, but I can’t make it go away. If you want to be somebody in this town, you’ve got to know something about someone else worth blabbing.
The carnival is all folded up in the center of town, exactly how they left it yesterday evening. There was a short but heavy downpour during the night. The cardboard French-fry holders have become soggy boats.
And here we are, summoned by Pim. He called this morning. After the usual three-second delay, he told me to meet him here. He didn’t say why. Judging by the solemn tone of his voice, we were going to have some kind of meeting.
We nab the best spot in town: the wooden bench against the low churchyard wall right in the middle of the carnival.
Tomorrow is Tuesday. The carnies will be up early to pack up their stands and travel on to the next village. Like anything you look forward to, the carnival takes a lot longer to set up than to break down. Tonight will be the last night I’ll be able to lie in bed and listen to the airplanes going around and around. I’ll hear them whizzing by one by one. If the wind is right, I’ll be able to hear the crack of bullets hitting chalk, too. And I’ll wonder why I wasn’t born in Lier, or in Zandhoven, or in some other town with more than one bakery, some place with fifteen carnival stands and two annual markets, where you learn from a young age that you can’t be everywhere at the same time. Kids from Lier and Zandhoven are—unlike us—used to choosing and losing.
I sit on the wall between the two boys. They keep giving each other looks as if I’m not there. When Laurens first showed up, Pim grabbed his arm and sniffed it. Laurens punched him in the gut, and that was the end of it. We rest our feet on the old plank where the bench seat is supposed to be.
“What are you guys looking at?” I watch Laurens try to roll up the sleeve he’s just used to wipe off the wet bench. It’s hard to do with one hand. I stand up, facing him, and help him roll it up. He doesn’t object. I fold back the sleeve slowly, buying time.
“Laurens and I have a plan,” Pim confesses. Laurens gives him a look to try to shut him up. Pim doesn’t see it.
“And when did you two come up with this plan?” I ask.
“Does it matter?” says Pim.
I shrug.
“It’s a really great plan, but we need you to come up with a riddle,” Laurens explains.
“What kind of riddle?” I sit back down between the two of them.
“A riddle that nobody can solve,” he says.
“And why do you need that?”
“We’ll tell you later. Just try to think of one. Laurens and I will work out the rest. Right, man?” Pim has been asking Laurens for his opinion more often lately. Or briefly summarizing for Laurens what he’s just told me, as if there’s some special code between guys that requires fewer letters.
“Okay, Laurens, it all starts with a good scoreboard.” Pim picks up a piece of soft white limestone, jumps over the cemetery wall and struts between the graves of unknown soldiers. He hastily draws a few lines on the stucco wall, forming an off-kilter grid. Laurens jumps down from the wall and follows him.
I pretend to be thinking hard about my riddle, but I’m straining my ears to hear what they’re saying.
“Your girls first, Laurens.”
They think quietly for a moment.
From where I’m sitting, I can just make out the fields to the right of our backyard. Between the fields and the house, parked on the narrow Bulksteeg, is a Jeep pulling a trailer. Its brake lights are on. Just as it catches my eye, the lights go out and the Jeep starts moving. It turns into the field, the trailer bouncing along behind it. Somewhere in the middle of the field, it comes to a stop. A man steps out and opens the trailer. A giant brown horse jumps out the back. It’s not Twinkle. She had to be put down. I think this one is a stallion. As it romps around the field, I notice something swinging back and forth beneath its sleek brown silhouette.
“Melissa, Ann, Indira . . .” Laurens rattles off the names of a few girls, and not just ones from the class we were tacked onto last year.
The man that just stepped out of the Jeep could be Elisa’s dad. Then a girl with a long ponytail steps out too. They turn around and walk across the field to check the barbed wire. Now I know for sure—Elisa is back.
After that late-summer school day four years ago, when we shared a changing room at the pool, Elisa and I were best friends for four months. I listened to her go on and on about horseback riding and wondered if she ever talked to her horse about me.
Every day except Wednesday, when school let out early, I’d go home with her to Mimi’s during the lunch break for a hot meal. The sandwiches I’d made for myself that morning would end up thrown away in the trash can on the playground.
Elisa always made me scarf down my lunch so she could spend more time with Twinkle, but I didn’t mind. I could tell she liked sharing her horse with me. Sometimes during the lunch break, she’d ride a few laps bareback. I’d watch her ponytail swing back and forth from one shoulder to the other in the same rhythm as the horse’s tail.
Oftentimes I wasn’t really focusing on her, but on the house off in the distance, my house, where Tessie and Jolan were eating sandwiches—the butter dish in the middle of the table, Mom slouched sideways in her chair, three sandwich fillings laid out neatly on a wooden cutting board, cheddar, monkey head, ringwurst. I wondered if I could really see it all, or if I only saw those details because I knew they were there.
One day, Elisa started talking about her mother.
“Does being with animals ever make you think of someone who’s no longer here? And then you treat the animal like you treated that person?” she asked.
I nodded, though I’d never lost anybody before, and in my case the opposite was true: people made me think of animals.
“Does Twinkle look like your mom?” I asked.
“No, stupid.” She shot me a dirty look. “Poor thing.”
“Who’s a poor thing?”
“My horse!”
Later that afternoon, without my asking, she told me the truth. Her mom had walked out on her and her dad right after she was born. Now she ran a hotel somewhere in Ireland. Elisa had never missed her because she’d never known her. She hugged her horse’s neck as she told me.
Afterwards she ran the horse through a few drills. I watched their two tails swing back and forth in unison. For the first time, I started to dislike her. I knew more about Elisa than she would ever want to know about me.
A few days later, four months after arriving at our school, she was bumped up to the sixth grade because she got such good grades on her first report card. The sixth-grade girls welcomed her with open arms, and soon enough they were all slathering their lips with glittery lip gloss, wearing puffer vests and plastic pacifier necklaces and filling in their eyebrows with pencil. It turned out every single member of Get Ready! was gay. Elisa was the only one who saw it coming.
I had lunch with her at Mimi’s a few more times, but we hardly talked. I was the scab that needed time to come off on its own without scratching.
It wasn’t long before Elisa started having lunch at school.
“Mimi packed me s
andwiches. She even put some of her home-made jam in a little jar to keep the bread from getting soggy,” she announced one morning without any advance notice. I had already thrown my sandwiches away, maybe because I was hoping it might still sway Elisa’s decision.
If you wanted to sit at the girls’ table, you had to answer a question: “Who would you least like to be fingered by? Leonardo DiCaprio or Tom Cruise?”
Since I didn’t know who Cruise or DiCaprio was, they didn’t ask me who I wanted to be fingered by, but how. Elisa opened her jar of jam and pushed it across the table at me.
“First, demonstrate. After that, you can sit.”
Later on it occurred to me that none of the girls knew how fingering worked. I should’ve just given it a go.
That afternoon, Twinkle and I met the same fate. Elisa stopped visiting the horse at lunchtime. She got invited to all kinds of birthday parties and let her new friends talk her into getting her hair crimped. After school, I’d wander out into the pasture and share what was left of my lunch with her horse.
One time, Jolan spotted me and told me I’d better stop. At school, he learned that sugar wasn’t good for animals, that it made them sick.
“Forget Elisa,” he said with a faint smile. “She’s not that great.” But his tone suggested otherwise.
After school that day, I spent my entire allowance on sour belts and jawbreakers at the Corner Store. Agnes even gave me a discount because it was almost my birthday. That afternoon, Twinkle and I ate candy until my stomach hurt.
“What does it mean when a horse lies on its side in the grass and starts foaming at the mouth?” Tessie asked at dinner that night. I almost choked on my meatball.
“Oh, he’s just taking a nap,” Jolan replied.
Elisa hasn’t been around these last two years. Our four-month friendship is fading further and further into the past, but the memories are more vivid than ever.
Pim and Laurens are too busy making their lists to notice the trailer off in the distance.
In the months I was friends with Elisa, they were obsessed with Lara Croft and addicted to that game where you have to take her through the Lost Valley. They never knew Elisa as well as I did. Maybe that’s when it happened, while I wasn’t around—maybe that’s when they started shutting me out.
“I pick Evelien, Heleen, Amber, Penny and Elisa,” Pim says.
The piece of limestone he’s writing with has gotten so small that he has to pinch it between his fingernails to avoid scraping his fingertips on the wall.
“Who’s Amber?” Laurens asks.
“A girl from my school. She’s really good with the laser cutter. She doesn’t know she’s a lesbian yet,” Pim says.
“So why’d you pick her?” Laurens asks.
“She’s got huge tits.”
A gray cloud rolls over the town. The light falls down in slanted rays, streaming through the emptiness between the top and bottom of the cloud.
I turn my gaze from Elisa to the cemetery.
“Eva, since you’re listening to everything we’re saying anyway, why don’t you tell us which girls you like?”
I pretend not to hear him.
“Okay, Eva doesn’t like anybody,” concludes Pim, and he goes to add this information to the wall.
“What do you mean by ‘like’?” I ask, looking them square in the eye. “There are different categories of ‘like’.”
“Say you’re having a party, and you’re allowed to invite a few girls. Who would you invite? Who would come?”
I take my time thinking it over, though there aren’t too many possible answers. “Tessie. And Elisa.”
“No,” Pim says, “family doesn’t count.”
I can’t just invite Laurens’s mom.
“Okay, Elisa then,” I say.
“That’s all?” Laurens asks. “Pim’s already got her on the list. Small party.”
I don’t say anything about Elisa being off in the distance. I don’t know why. I can’t tell who I don’t want to share with who.
“You got that riddle yet?” Laurens asks.
I shake my head. I haven’t thought beyond the fact that I’m supposed to come up with a riddle.
“We’ll start by giving points, then,” Pim says to Laurens. “We don’t need the riddle for that.”
They’ve had their point system for years. They came up with it one night while we were camping out in a tent in Laurens’s backyard. They gave girls points based on individual aspects of their appearance. My role was not to give scores but to make sure Laurens and Pim remained objective enough, that they weren’t blinded by a crush. They used practically the same scoring system as everybody else in and outside of town; they were just the only ones to actually write it down, in black and white.
I was the secretary. My job was to keep quiet and take notes.
Before we started, we would calibrate the scale by identifying the ugliest and the prettiest girl in town. Everyone in between got a score between 0.5 and 9.5. Each girl started at zero. Points were given for each attractive physical attribute, and scores were carefully rounded to the first decimal point.
Laurens and Pim were mostly interested in using the point system to figure out their own worth. They never discussed their own scores out loud. All they had were vague suspicions based on the girls they saw as equals.
Over two summers, 1999 and 2000, the most relevant girls in town were scored. There were only two groups that Laurens and Pim didn’t discuss: the uppermost layer (too old) and the bottommost layer (too young). Everyone else—every girl of a relevant age—was examined in detail.
I can’t remember when the last evaluation took place. The upper and lower layers seem to be shrinking. The older Laurens and Pim get, the more girls they’re interested in. Age also obliges them to act differently. Today, they don’t calibrate the scale. Instead of zero, each girl starts at ten. Rather than adding points for pretty features, they subtract them for ugly ones. Whether this is kinder or not, I have no idea.
One by one, Pim and Laurens go down the list of names they’ve just written on the cemetery wall. Birthmarks, crooked front teeth, flat in the front, flat in the back. No detail is spared. They don’t go any lower than one because anyone with a clam is at least worth that.
I look out at Elisa, at the distance between us that can be counted in steps—about three hundred. But now that I’m standing still, it seems unbridgeable.
Oddly enough, Laurens and Pim have nothing but positive things to say about her.
“Come on, no girl is perfect,” I say.
“We need a ten,” Pim says, “so we can separate the tens from the fives.”
“So you’re saying there’s no girl prettier than Elisa?”
The boys look at each other and shrug.
Three years ago, she just left town, without a word, without owing anybody anything. Her sudden disappearance is what makes her so attractive now.
“All she talks about is her horse. I’d subtract points for that.”
“That may be, Eva, but we’re talking about looks here.” Pim picks up a new rock. He numbers the names on the wall based on the score behind the name.
In the end, Elisa doesn’t get a ten. But her score is still the highest at 9.5, a half-point from perfection. The deduction was just for good measure, some kind of concession to me.
“Now all we need is a good riddle,” Laurens says.
“Come on, Eva. You gonna help us out or what?”
The harder I try, the harder it is to think of a good riddle. Off in the distance, Elisa and her dad are getting ready to leave.
“Can’t I get one night to come up with something?”
Laurens lets out a deep sigh and looks at Pim.
“Okay by me,” Pim says.
The church bells ring twelve times. The patio outside the Welcome is empty, except for two old men waiting to order their first pint of the day. They eye each other as if each one is sitting in the other’s spot.
The
carnival slowly starts to wake up. At the sound of the buzzer signaling the first unmanned test drive, two people show up in the street: a grandfather and grandson. I don’t know them. They don’t live here in town. They climb into a bumper car together and drive around the empty rink. I watch them make the same loops over and over, nobody in their way. It’s a beautiful sight.
Laurens carefully pulls two fifties out of his pocket. I don’t have any money on me. Pim takes out two fifties too.
“Who’s gonna be the treasurer?” Pim asks.
The two boys fall silent and exchange a rehearsed look.
“How about Eva?” they say in unison.
They pool their money and hand it over.
“Which ride do you want to go on first?” I ask.
“This isn’t for the carnival,” Laurens says. “It’s an investment.”
“An investment in what?”
“You’ll find out tomorrow,” Pim says.
We sit there for a while. The carnival is starting to fill up. My parents didn’t give me any money. I just assumed Laurens and Pim would let me ride shotgun with them. That’s our tradition.
“I’m going home,” Pim says. “All you’ve got to do is show up tomorrow with the money and a riddle. We’ll handle the rest.”
“Let’s meet at my house tomorrow at 1:45,” Laurens says. “And Eva, if you can’t come up with anything, call me beforehand.”
They two boys walk off in opposite directions. I watch them leave, looking from left to right, until I realize I’m shaking my head no.
The Air Salesmen
IT WAS IN ’99, the day the salesmen showed up at our door, that I first realized that Tessie wasn’t okay. I’d already had a vague suspicion. In addition to her excessive desire to win at Minesweeper, it was taking her longer and longer to get home from school. It never took me more than two minutes to put away my bike and take off my shoes.
A little after four, the doorbell rang. I opened it to find two men in suits. At first glance, there was very little about them that made sense. One was short and squatty and had a big head. The other was tall and gangly with a small head. Apparently, these types always come in this combination and were the reason why houses in towns like Bovenmeer still had a doorbell.